9 of the darkest and most controversial teen movies ever made

Some teen movies cover dark or sexual themes that can
result in controversy or mixed reactions from viewers and
critics.

The film distributor of "Assassination Nation" said they knew
the film was a "stick of dynamite."

The teen rom-com "Sierra Burgess Is A Loser" contained
plotlines and jokes that offended many viewers.

A lot of movies about teenagers
tend to delve into the darker side of being a teen. And although
some of these portrayals are met with positive reactions, some
are surrounded by a bit of controversy or mixed responses from
viewers and critics alike.

From "Heathers" to "Kids," here
are nine of the darkest or most controversial teen movies that
have been released in the past few decades.

Editor's note: This post deals with topics like sexual
assault and violence that could be disturbing to some readers. It
also contains spoilers for the films.

Many consider "Heathers" to be one of the darkest teen movies ever, but one of the proposed original endings of the film was considered to be even darker.

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One potential ending of "Heathers" involved a prom in heaven.

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New World Pictures

Teenage angst comes with a body
count in the 1988 pitch-black comedy "Heathers." Winona Ryder and
Christian Slater star as a teenage couple who murder their
popular classmates and cover it up by making their deaths look
like suicides.

Many viewers already felt the
ending was pretty bleak (Slater's character blows himself up
after his attempt to bomb the school was thwarted) but the
original ending could've been different. Writer Daniel Waters
told Topless Robot that the original script called for
Slater's character to successfully blow up the high school and
then the film would depict the deceased students at a prom in
heaven.

Director Michael Lehmann
told
Broadly that studio executives refused to make the
movie unless the ending was changed. He said executives worried
that "blood would be on [their] hands" if anyone attempted to
emulate the film's content.

"I would have liked to have seen
the original ending with its full irony out there, with a darker
feel and a kind of odd, perverse sense of optimism," he
added.

"River's Edge" was called "an exercise in despair" by film critic Roger Ebert.

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It's considered to be an indie thriller.

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Hemdale

The 1986 movie "River's Edge"
follows a group of teenagers who have mixed and delayed reactions
when they discover a friend has murdered his girlfriend. Loosely
based on the real-life
1981 murder
of a 14-year-old girl in
Milpitas, California, some felt "River's Edge" was quite dark and
offered no explanations, only bleak depictions of detached and
despondent teens.

Film critic Roger Ebert compared the movie to the classic crime films
"The Onion Field" and "In Cold Blood," but "River's Edge" was
polarizing at the time of its release.

"Some executives from a small
distribution company wouldn't look at us [after a festival
screening]," one of the movie's producers Midge Sanford told
Vice in 2017. "People either embraced it or were very put off
by it. It didn't get picked up right away."

The film distributor of "Assassination Nation" said they knew the film was a "stick of dynamite."

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Bella Thorne in "Assassination Nation."

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BRON Studios

"Assassination Nation"
stars Suki Waterhouse,
Hari Nef, and Abra as a
group of suburban high school girls who find their lives turned
upside down when a hacker begins sharing their town's secrets on
the internet.

The 2018 film divided most
critics, who either
hailed it as "a vicious, cathartic horror film about
misogyny" or
wrote it off
as "a badly bungled attempt at social
commentary," but the controversy surrounding the movie started
before it was even released.

Christian Parkes, chief marketing
officer of the film's distributor, Neon, told Variety that the
team was "unable to rent"
billboard space to put their promotional poster on. The
poster contained the words "A-- A-- In Nation."

"Every single out of home vendor
in Los Angeles passed," Parkes told the publication. "They
thought it was a political ad calling for violence or that it was
just plain offensive because it had the word 'a--' in it."

Parkes also said the film's
online trailers were rejected by YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram
because they contained images of guns pointed directly at the
camera, as well as footage of women undressing.

He added: "We knew that this film
was a stick of dynamite. We didn't want to dress it up into
something it isn't. This isn't a feel-good coming-of-age story.
It's an honest meditation on where we are as a culture."

"Sierra Burgess Is A Loser" contained plotlines and jokes that offended many viewers.

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RJ Cyler and Shannon Purser star in "Sierra Burgess Is a Loser."

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Netflix

The 2018 Netflix original teen
romantic comedy
"Sierra Burgess Is A
Loser" faced a lot of
backlash because of certain jokes, scenes, and plotlines that
some viewers considered to be offensive or inappropriate. The
film stars Shannon Purser as an unpopular high schooler who
tricks her crush into falling for her while pretending to be the
school's queen bee.

The film was called out for its
storyline in which the leading character pretends to be
deaf.

"It is extremely easy to
make jokes about marginalized/disfranchised groups," model and
activist Nyle DiMarco, who is deaf, wrote when he
criticized the film on Twitter in 2018. "But that makes you a
lazy writer. And honestly, you shouldn't make these jokes AT ALL
because our lives are on the line ... Pretending to be deaf is
NOT [OK.]"

In addition to calling out
multiple
homophobic and
transphobic remarks
and jokes made by characters in the film, viewers were vocal
about the film's worrisome attitude toward the
concept of consent.
Many accused the movie of
romanticizing deception and catfishing, calling attention to the
particular scene when Sierra tricks her crush into kissing her
when he believes he's about to
kiss someone else.

Some critics said "Jawbreaker" was "grotesque" and "sleazy."

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The film involves a kidnapping prank gone wrong.

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Tristar Pictures

There were plenty of teen movies
released in 1999, but one that received a lot of spirited
reactions is the dark comedy "Jawbreaker." The film stars Rose
McGowan, Rebecca Gayheart, and Julie Benz as three teenage mean
girls who accidentally kill their best friend in birthday
kidnapping prank gone horribly wrong.

With a 7% critic score on Rotten
Tomatoes, the movie was
disliked by most
critics and viewers
who have called the movie "derivative,"
"grotesque,"
and "unfunny." In
what's been called the film's most controversial scene, McGowan's
character has sex with a man (played by then-fiancé Marilyn
Manson) while her friend's corpse lay under the bed as part of a
plan to frame him for the murder.

"The movie was originally rated
NC-17," the film's writer and director Darren Stein told
Broadly in 2016. "One of the cuts we had to make to
get an R was to cut out the number of thrusts. It was shot in
slow motion. It was really sleazy. I guess too sleazy for the
MPAA."

"Kids" shocked audiences with its graphic depiction of teenagers in New York City.

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Miramax's former co-chairs created a new company to be able to distribute the film.

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Guys Upstairs

The 1995 movie was a graphic look
at the lives of New York City teens and it featured a cast of
mostly underaged, first-time actors.

During a 2015 screening of
"Kids," director Larry Clark said he wanted to make a film that
had
"never been made before," reported The Hollywood
Reporter. At the panel, he and the film's lead actor Leo
Fitzpatrick agreed the film could never be made today.

The film, which includes graphic
depictions of underage sex and drug use, was fraught with
controversy from the beginning. In a 1995 review,
The Washington Post
critic Rita Kempley said the
movie was "virtually child pornography disguised as
a cautionary documentary" and critic Janet Maslin at the
New York Times called the film
"so bleak and legitimately shocking that it makes
almost any other portrait of American adolescence look like the
picture of Dorian Gray."

"I knew that the movie was going to be pretty controversial
and that we were tackling a lot of new stuff like underage
sexuality," the film's cinematographer Eric Edwards
told Dazed in 2015. "Larry's whole position was that this is
what kids were f------ doing, and parents don't know
this and they should know, so Larry was going to show - I don't
want to say the darker side, but just a more truthful side of
what kids were about, what kids were doing. He just wanted to
expose it and explore it in a raw way."

Harvey Weinstein, former
co-chairman of Miramax Films who later purchased and distributed
the film, told the
New York Times in 2015 that "Kids" was "the most
controversial film he'd ever been associated with." Weinstein,
who has been accused of
sexual assault and sexual harassment by multiple women in
recent years, also told
Rolling Stone in 2015 that the film was threatened not only
"on a censorship level, we were threatened on a criminal
level."

Because Walt Disney
Company, former parent company of Miramax Films,
had a policy about not releasing NC-17 films, the former Miramax
co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein decided to "circumvent" the
family-oriented company by
creating a new, independent company so they could sell and
distribute the controversial film without creating a
"potential problem" for Miramax.

Miramax also lobbied hard against
the NC-17 rating that was handed down and ultimately released the
film without a rating.

"We did try to get an R rating;
in fact, when the R was rejected, I remembering going out to LA
with [a lawyer]," former Miramax executive Eamonn Bowles
told Rolling Stone in 2015. " ... There was no actual nudity
in the film. But at every juncture, and I have to emphasize this
strongly, every strategic thing we did we had vetted by a whole
team of lawyers, including the preeminent child pornography
lawyer in the country."

"Ken Park" was called out for its graphic depictions of sexual assault and violence.

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There's nudity in the film.

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Kasander Film Company

Director Larry Clark teamed up
with writer Harmony Korine for the second time to create 2002's
"Ken Park," a dark dive into the lives of skateboarding teens.
"Ken Park" begins with the titular character's suicide and
branches off into the stories of four of his friends in the weeks
leading up to his death. The movie contains graphic depictions of
violence and sexual assault, as well as multiple
sex scenes featuring the movie's
young-looking (although not underaged) cast.

In 2003,
The Guardian
reported that police in Sydney
raided a public screening and confiscated a copy of the film,
which had been effectively
banned in Australia in 2003 when the office of film and
literature classification, responsible for the classification of
films, refused to give the film a certificate. The reason given
for this refusal was they determined the film depicted "child sex
abuse, actual sex by people depicted as minors and sexualized
violence."

"It never got to the point where
there was a censorship issue - the movie's out all over the
world," Clark told the now-defunct site
Nerve in 2006. "We're still trying to get it out.
Obviously it would be unrated and obviously, it wouldn't be
appropriate for young children. I'm not stupid, you know. I
wouldn't want my son, when he was 13, 14 years old, to have seen
an autoerotic asphyxiation scene."

Many critics felt "Welcome to the Dollhouse" was incredibly dark but still funny.

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The film had a few different sequels.

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Sony Pictures Classic

The 1995 movie "Welcome to the Dollhouse" depicts pretty intense
scenes of on-screen bullying. Heather Matarazzo stars as Dawn
Weiner, an awkward 11-year-old, who is ignored by her family and
routinely mocked and threatened by her suburban New Jersey
classmates.

The generally well-received dark comedy "does a superb job of
showing how cruelty begets cruelty," according to film critic
John Petrakis
in The Chicago Tribune.

The movie has been long-considered by some critics to be one of
the darkest yet comical stories about the "unrelenting hell that
is middle school" and the film's director Todd Solondz, who is no
stranger to the dark film genre, was called "America's
Darkest Filmmaker" by Vice in 2016.

Some called "Thirteen" a gritty portrait of young teenage girls and the film has received mixed reactions.

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The film's director told Refinery29 that juvenile court judges said the movie was mild.

In 2003, Reed told New York Daily
News that the film, based on her own life, was "80%
true."
She co-wrote the script with the film's director Catherine
Hardwicke.

"Thirteen" was met with
controversy when it was first released. In a 2016 interview
with
Refinery
29, Hardwicke said
that she brought along juvenile court judges and directors of
rehab centers to back her up when she was questioned by concerned
parents at post-screening panels.

"Three mothers stand up: 'My
daughter would never do that,'" she recalled in the interview
with Refinery29. "And then the judge would say, 'Excuse me, this
movie is mild. Not one person got pregnant. No one got in a car
crash, no one [died by] suicide. Nobody died. I see much more
elevated cases than this every single day.'"